Honesty and Integrity: Valley to Coast Appraisals

Generally, appraising a long term career. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have increased more than ever before. So it goes without question in this day and age that real estate appraisal can definitely be dubbed a profession rather than a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we must follow strict ethical considerations.

For an appraiser the primary obligation is to their client. Normally, for a typical residential appraisal, the lender places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Appraisers have rules and regulations they must follow, including confidentiality for their clients a homeowner, if you require to review the appraisal document, you generally have to get it from your lender. Other obligations also include, numerical accuracy depending on the scope of the assignment, attaining and maintaining a certain level of competency and education, and of course, the appraiser must behave in a professional manner. Maintaining high ethics is standard operating procedure for us at Valley to Coast Appraisals.

In some cases appraisers will have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, including homeowners, buyers and sellers, or others. Those third parties normally are spelled out in scope of the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary roll is limited to those parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the assignment.

Appraisers also have standards outside of boundaries of clients and others. For example, appraisers must store their work files for a minimum of five years - at Valley to Coast Appraisals you can rest assured that we adhere to that rule.

We meet or beat the industry standards and rules set in place for ethics. We refuse to accept anything less from ourselves. Doing orders on contingency fees is not something we can consider That is, we can't agree to do an appraisal report and get paid only if the loan closes. We don't do assignments on percentage fees. That is probably the appraisal industries biggest taboo, because it would tend to make appraisers increase the value of homes or properties to increase their fee. We set ourselves to a higher standard. Other unethical practices may be established by state law or professional organizations that the appraiser belongs.

The Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) also defines a violation in ethics as the acceptance of an assignment that is contingent on "the reporting of a pre-determined result (e.g., opinion of value)," "a direction in assignment results that favors the cause of the client," "the amount of a value opinion," as well as other situations. We diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can be confident we are going above and beyond to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

With Valley to Coast Appraisals, you won't have any doubts that you're getting 100 percent ethical, honest service.